coordination in paddy farming, where water resources are being shared amongst many
rice farmers. And often, there are other things that are
shared, too, by local groups. For example, forest resources or hunting.
Solving the Tragedy of the Commons by using internal, social regulations has
limits, however. What if we don't know, know our neighbors
very well? An example of this is cod.
Cod was fished by peoples of many different countries.
And we don't always know people from different countries very well.
We don't communicate very well. We don't co-ordinate our actions very
well. In fact, there were three cod wars between
Britain and Iceland, as they competed with one another to use the cod resource.
So, if we're not in the position to use social methods to solve tragedy of the
common problems, we might need to look outside that, that group to an external
regulator. Normally, we think about this as being a
government. Lots of nation states today are very
large. Here in United States we have about
300,000,000 people. We can't socially regulate every problem,
because it's impossible to know every other citizen of the country.
So, you can imagine how the problem gets even harder when we deal with people of
other countries who speak other languages and have other legal systems and moral
points of view. If governments are uncorrupt and have good
sources of information, this can be a good way to solve a Tragedy of the Commons
problem because they have the power to issue, regulations that prevent overuse of
a resource. So, an example that has been tried in the
case of fishing stocks is to limit the amount of fish caught.
There is regulation about the size of fishing vessels, the amount that each
vessel can catch, the dates, tackle used, a long list of approaches have been tried.
So, if governments are reliable, they know what they're doing and they have good
laws, it could be that regulations can solve some Tragedy of the Common problems.
Unfortunately, these requirements that we have.
A reliable government that's not corrupt. And also a reliable government that has
good information about the natural system. Those two requirements are not always met.
And so, in many places in the world, we see Tragedies of the Commons continue
despite laws, on the books that would seem to preclude that possibility.
An example is, deforestation. A lot of countries have reasonable laws to
prevent overuse of forest resources. But because the government is too weak or
too corrupt to enforce those laws effectively.
We see deforestation occur nonetheless. An example of this might be Haiti.
Many western fisheries have collapsed, despite, good government.
That is to say reliable government that is not corrupt and has the strength to
enforce all of its regulations. There's a couple of reasons for this.
Partly there is a lot of unreported illegal fishing that goes on.
If you look at this diagram here you can see that between twenty and 30 percent of
the world's oyster catch is actually, either illegal or unreported.
Or secondly, the government just might not know enough information to make good
regulations. And there's a long history of this that
the government bodies involved don't know for example how many fish there are in the
sea. And if you don't know basic information
like that very well, then you can't make regulations that make a sustainable
resource very well either. And of course, there's another problem.
Many of the tragedies that we are talking about occur in commons that are shared by
governments all around the world. No one organization is responsible for the
world's oceans or the world's atmosphere. So, if there are multiple governments that
run a resource. For example, the world's ocean or the
fisheries, then you see how we just return back to the standard Tragedy of the
Commons model. Each government has its own incentives.
But that's different from all every different nation and the collective view
is different from the individual government view.
I'd just like to finish with a further thought, and that like all human
creations, governments are flawed things, and they're limited in their capacities.
And so, if individuals make poor decisions, then it's possible too that
governments can make poor decisions and make poor regulations.
So, although they are capable of solving some of these problems, we have evidence
that they haven't been able to solve all of these problems.